After one of my regular visits to the JohnsonBanks (UK design firm) website’s “Thought of the Week”, I was directed to this post in DesignObserver (that I somehow missed). It discussed the seepage of the title phrase into the client’s lexicon and the potentially destructive quality to encouraging this. Below are some excerpts, but here’s the full post. Today, the term has seeped into everyday usage, and it has become widely used by commissioners of graphic design. Why? Is it because it’s a piece of useful shorthand that emphasizes the importance of usability in modern strategy-driven communications? Or is it a babyish term that reduces the designer to the role of decorator — someone who gets asked to “color-in” strategic plans made by smart marketing wonks who think design is a no-brainer? British designer Michael Johnson … noted an increase in usage of the term: “Yes, people use it a lot,” he says. “I’ve always mistrusted it as a phrase — apart from sounding vaguely pornographic, I think when you succumb to ‘look and feel’ you’re only a hop and a skip away from mood boards, and that really is the end of design as we know it. It’s the kind of phrase that researchers love to throw around in focus groups, a process almost always destined to remove the last hints of creativity from a project.” Ever since W.A. Dwiggins became the first person to call himself a graphic designer, designers have agonized over the nomenclature of their trade. In recent decades, they have been dumping the word design as fast as they can in favor of more business-friendly terms such as corporate image, corporate identity, and most recently, branding. Does any of this matter? If clients are happy to refer to the output of graphic designers as “look and feel,” where’s the harm? Well, the harm is that it’s a euphemistic term that no better describes what good design can do that “nip and tuck” describes the work of a skilled brain surgeon. We encourage its use at our peril. Resist, I say Post a comment
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